Time as known to mankind
Since ages Spirituality, mysticism and the Yogis have left us wondering about what is possible. But today, I‘m here to talk only about time. Yogis have always been counter-intuitive. Well — Scientists too !
If you’re wondering about stuff like: How to time travel ? What would you tell your 5 year old self ? Is time travel possible ? Or thinking about time as depicted in the popular TV show Flash or the movie Interstellar and have come to some conjectures ? Or daydreaming about how you could have spent your past differently ? Well then I’m here to plant more thoughts! Embrace yourself. One more advantage- in the end, you get to decide if Inception is possible.
If you’re bursting out of curiosity and need a gist of what we’re talking, here you go: We’re deluded and we must explore the real nature of time. No curiosity? that’s okay. They say it killed a cat !
“Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” — Einstein
( Light year: Is the distance travelled by light in one year. This means, if there is a source of light one light year away, it would take one year for you to observe/realize/perceive the source )
The Scenario
Let us suppose you are currently witnessing an explosion of a star located one light year away. That means, it took one year for the light from explosion to reach you. Which implicates the explosion happened one year ago. So what is your definition of the moment of explosion? A) that moment one year ago? or B) the current moment? because you are seeing the explosion right now? Most of us would choose the moment one year ago. The actual moment of explosion. Does that mean we are living in the past? Take time and think of choosing both the options. If you go for option B, are we living in false reality ? That would be a worse way to conclude. Whoa ! So, if we are not living in the past or in false reality, did we just tap into past? Nope.
Okay, do we know a similar scenario for the future? And what did we do? if we didn’t tap into the past?
Hold on, take a deep breath, re-imagine the above scenario. You on earth and a star about to explode one light year away. Done? now lets dive in.
Now let’s insert a human space-ship at a distance half-way between, i-e the space ship is half light year away from both the point of explosion and the earth. Now the humans on that space-ship would see the same explosion half-year earlier than you, because the light from explosion reaches them half-year early. So did they see the future? Again, nope.
All time exists all the time
In the above example, we can see that we are able to change the perception of time with respect to place, i-e we are experiencing time differently at different places. So, It is a possibility that all time exists all the time. We neither tapped into the future nor into the past because all time exists all time. The time we are experiencing is an illusion.
The above scenario is a very simple example for Einstein’s theory of General relativity. Yes ! This is an ideal scenario where parameters like obstacles in the path of light, the distance from which human eye can recognize light and telescopes are ignored. It’s just that we’re avoiding complex calculations.
Before we see how all time exists all the time, let’s make one more thing clear— definition of Yogis. Just as scientists take up science as a tool for their study, yogis take up Spirituality as their tool of study. Again, Spirituality is not about God or religion. Buddha, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Srinivas Ramanujan (a mathematician too), Vivekananda are a few popular yogis I can name.
So how do we deal with this fabric of time? What do other scientists have to say about time? What do the Yogis say?
Yogis always told, ’Be here, now’ . Because past present and future are all with you currently. Time is just an illusion. The thing with yogis is that they just give us their experiences, not explanations, but our logical mind seeks explanations, which a few scientists have tried explaining.
Can we overcome this illusion of time and experience eternity? It’s a yes and a no
We would have to travel at the speed of light to conquer time and experience eternity. If you are curious about how? then look up Time Dilation. But with the theory of Einstein we know today, we would shrink to zero once we attain the speed of light. You can look up Lorentz factor (Length Contraction) to know how you would disappear into oblivion in the process of time dilation. In other words an object that has nonzero rest mass cannot travel at the speed of light. As the object approaches the speed of light, the object’s energy and momentum increase without bound. (Theory of Special relativity)
Moreover, scientists have been able to slow down time to a significant amount inside particle accelerators.
Quantum mechanics
One good time defying phenomenon I can quote from Quantum mechanics is the phenomenon of 'Quantum Superposition’. According to the experiments, Quantum superposition is the ability of a particle to exist in two or more different states at same time. For example, a Quantum bit known as qbit can be both zero and one at the same time. I was baffled when I read that for the first time. Today we’re building computers based on superposition.
What if all the actions you performed till date and all the actions you chose not to perform are just a set of states in a superposition ? And you’re perceiving only a few of them because you are an entity interacting with the superposition to give final outcome of the superposition.Then all time would exist all time 😅 Thinking of time in this manner answers most our questions about time travel.
If we consider a few of our life situations in a superposition. This is how It would look. We’re considering only a fixed number of situations and entities to avoid complexity. These situations below are existing all time just like you are able to see all of them existing now and you can traverse anyway to give a particular outcome.
In the above example you can traverse in any manner and each and every state exists all the time.
Traversal 1: You cried so you were fed water
Traversal 2: You weren’t fed water so you cried and hence you were fed water
Traversal 3: You didn’t cry but you were fed water so you cried
There are more traversals for the above superposition and this can go endless as we add more situations. The event of you being born can also be considered for traversals, but there would be a need to explain reincarnation and add the events that are possible before being born, which increases the complexity. The illustration we saw above is popularly known as the Many worlds theory where each traversal is a different parallel world. Just like many pictures played continuously make a movie, many states traversed together make a world/ your life on one particular world.
To further see, how all time exists all the time, and what Quantum Mechanics has more to say about time, we would have to look at the Feynman Path integral. Stephen Hawking in his paper ‘Cosmology from the Top Down’ says “Some people make a great mystery of the multi universe, or the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory, but to me, these are just different expressions of the Feynman path integral.” We will also have to look at ‘Einstein’s field equations’ to get a mathematical derivation of how all time exists all time through classical physics.
Which is indeed a very long journey.
Now you can go and re-read the questions we asked in the beginning and get high on thoughts 😉
I quote once again 'Be here. Now’.
Have a great day ahead !
By the way, if you have realised, we took a peek at Einstein’s theory of General relativity, Special relativity, Quantum superposition and The Many worlds theory.
You can find more interesting stuff on Quantum Mechanics in my article God and Science
